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Forever young

Today would have been John F. Kennedy’s 96th birthday. It’s hard to think of JFK as an old man. In our minds he is forever youthful because he died young. He was only in his first term as president – and the father of young children – when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet on that grim November morning in Dallas.

But on this day, in 1917, Rose Kennedy gave birth to the second of her nine children at home on Beals Street in Brookline, Mass. His older brother, Joe, had been named after the patriarch of this Irish-American clan; and the matriarch of the family named her second son after her own father, John Francis Fitzgerald – “Honey Fitz,” a former U.S. congressman, beloved Boston mayor, and devoted Red Sox fan.